Simon, by my saying that "...all forms of crime by the poor against the rich should be supported", it is a "sad fact" that "so little of it is directed against the rich and powerful", and that "the employee in question should be supported", I was undoubtedly making political assertions. What is strange though is that you refer to my espousements as "peddling politics" but not your own. If you were simply expressing your opinion as I was, then surely you were also "peddling politics". This brand of hypocrisy has a fine tradition and a rich record. When the New York Times, or similarly respectable journals of record, writes an editorial it is merely expressing its right to hold a particular point of view. But when a socialist newspaper expresses its opinions on matters of political import, it is "peddling politics", engaging in "demagogic ravings" or erecting "Stalinist smokescreens". The contrast is stark and revealing - yet not surprising.
Moving on, again we find ourselves back at square one - unable to differentiate between saying that the act was "a crime by the poor against the rich" (albeit a minor one) - an assertion which I believe has been proved technically correct - and saying that the employee's act was political. It depends on the employee's motives. It it was simply to alleviate hunger, then it was not political. If however, the act was performed with greater intents and purposes such as furthering the political struggle (which it wouldn't do anyway), bringing down McDonald's and smashing the capitalist system, or simply in retaliation to something McDonald's had done to the employee, it could conceivably be judged a political act. It was almost certainly the former.
My support for the employee's petty criminal act rests on my favouring of the underdog, my hatred of McDonald's all it stands for and the capitalist system more widely, and my distrust of a legal system which does NOT equally protect the poor from "crime" as it does the rich. But that's another story. Your reluctance to end your unabashed declarations that I inferred that the employee's act was a political one is illustrative of the absence of any substantive political arguments.
As you have conceded, the roots of your remonstrations of "theft" as a "crime", are religious. In other words, some might say, groundless. I need not comment further.
Perhaps if you take your head out of the New Statesman, the Guardian and any other small-l liberal journals and can manage to shrug off the legacy past onto you by your nursery teacher, you may one day hope to understand, interpret and help to change the world. But I doubt it.
